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On our way to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 21st Birthday party, my programmer friend explained to me why, if it weren’t for the work of the good folks over at EFF, neither eBay nor WikiLeaks could do their thing. Read more »

The Family Jams, a documentary by Kevin Barker (the man behind Currituck Co. and and on-again-off-again accompanist of Vetiver), captures the careers of the genre-fucks Devandra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Vetiver in their infancy on a 2004 summer tour. (The doc screens Thurs/24 as part of the Noise Pop Film Festival; check out a trailer here.)

Near the film’s beginning, Barker, in a voiceover, shares a memory of seeing large flying cockroaches that lived in his grandmother’s kitchen drawers in Hawaii. In the next scene — whodathunk? — a large cockroach appears during a show in Houston, Texas when his musical family (Banhart, Newsom, and Andy Cabic of Vetiver, among others) plays together at the show’s end. Could this link 'twixt families be made any more obvious?

I lived at Hayes and Fillmore in the 1980s, at the height of the crack epidemic, and a spectacularly unsuccessful dealer hung out on my corner. He was so bad at selling the stuff (or else was smoking so much of it) that he was constantly broke and used to knock on my door late at night ask to borrow a buck to buy a can of beer.

At one point he owed me about $10, and offered to pay me back with “some hubba.” He proceded to open his fist and show me a couple of grimy rocks rolling around in his filthy, sweaty palm.

Robert Moses may not know it, but he is a pied piper. The ability to hold the attention of 200 hormone-packed middle school students at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday in early February must qualify as some kind of superhuman ability.

But Moses, choreographer and artistic director of Robert Moses' Kin, defers to his own pied piper, the one on stage who immortalized the German city of Hamelin. As the fabled character, Dexandro "D" Montalvo twitches, churns, and first commands the rats; then, with beckoning index fingers, he mesmerizes the "children" to follow him who knows where.Read more »

Calitics has a revealing letter from David Onek, a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice, a former member of the San Francisco Police Commission and a candidate in the 2011 District Attorney’s race, demanding greater transparency from the D.A.’s office when it comes to explaining why officers have been cleared in officer-related shootings. Read more »

'Tis the weekly sex events of playa-sized proportions! In addition to our city editor Steve Jones' reading at Kinky Salon this week, this week you can also catch a reception for a new art book on goofily half-attired or gleefully naked Burners published for the world to see, courtesy of playa photographer Julian Cash.

The People of Burning Man is the product of Cash's insistence on bringing an immaculate white portable studio to the playa year after year, setting up actual photo shoots in a festival world where most documentation relies on the most candid of cameras. The result is that BRC's wacky personas and costumes are explicated and orchestrated better than they'd ever be if you just saw them strutting past you through Center Camp. Not surprisingly, a lot of the photos have to do with sex. But Cash's impish camera-side manner has a way of making even the most pierced, punked perv look playful (I should know, he took myphotos last fall) – and his signature white backdrop strips his subjects' context away so that you can really focus on what that pair of furry pink chaps, nipple paint, or lifted tutu wants to express.

As the struggle to keep the doors open at the legendary women's clinic, Lyon-Martin Health Services, continues here in San Francisco, yet another blow to women's health care at the national level has advocates sounding the alarm. Planned Parenthood has issued a call for help defeating a federal bill it's calling "the most dangerous legislative assault on women's health and Planned Parenthood in our 95-year history."

Congress is gearing up to vote on the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act, which would eliminate federal funding for all health-care services provided by any clinic that offers abortion services. The legislation places Planned Parenthood, a leading national provider of reproductive health care serving primarily low-income and uninsured women, squarely in the crosshairs. Read more »

It's easy to get turned off by protests, to say that direct action, sit-ins, arrests are counterprodcutive and don't make any difference. But then you read something like this and you realize that, over time, in-your-face activism can have a very direct impact.Read more »

For decades, the Guardian has done story after story on PG&E's deteriorating service, terrible maintenance record, continuous stonewalling and coverups, emphasis -- not on safety -- but on jacking up executive salaries and putting tens of millions into fighting community choice aggregation in San Francisco and Marin, and on the granddaddy of monopoly moves (last year's Prop 16). The San Francisco Chronicle, to its immense credit, has come through with a series of stories laying out PG&E's virtually criminal behavior in the San Bruno pipeline explosion.

Now TURN, the consumer watchdog over utilities, is putting forth an excellent way to fight back with a tough petition and spreading the word. TURN says, "PG&E charged its customers $5 million to fix a gas pipeline under San Bruno in 2009, but delayed the work citing other priorities. The company then spent $5 million on executive bonuses."

Take action to demand PG&E make customer safety its top priority, and pay for the costs of this tragedy with its own profits, not our pockets. Read more »

I couldn't reach financier Warren Hellman before I wrote my column in this week's paper talking about the employee pension discussions. But he called me yesterday (Feb. 16) after he'd seen it, and I expected he'd give me some shit.

Wrong.

In fact, Hellman had only one problem with my analysis: "Your article is didn't go far enough." Turns out he thinks I was a bit too easy on the billionaires.Read more »

Of all the theatre companies in the Bay Area currently operating, the most specifically focused may well be our premiere (or rather only) amateur Francophone company Le Theatre Platypus. Though the Goethe-Institut sometimes hosts touring productions, such as Bridge Marklund’s “Faust in the Box” which will play in the Institut auditorium March 3 and The Mission Cultural Center hosts occasional Spanish-language plays such as Dolores Prida’s “Coser y Cantar” (playing March 17-19), dedicated multi-lingual local troupes are unfortunately scarce. This makes going to see a Platypus play more than just a night out, but a bona-fide cultural immersion experience.

Another year and another ferocious super-natural lion symbolically rips and spits out heads of lettuce along the storefronts of Kearny Avenue. This is the lion dance, a highly visceral and visually unique performance that is a centerpiece in the city's Southwest Airlines Chinese New Year parade, a 150-year old event that draws the participation of over 100 community groups.

Although each performance is different, one thing stays the same: the lion dancers' faces are never revealed and their identity stays behind the mask. We were lucky enough to speak with one veteran lion dancer about growing up with the parade and his time inside the lion. Read more »

I believe it's almost everyone's dream to be able to fly and for some, it is a reality. I stopped by ODC Theater this week to check out a final rehearsal of a dance piece choreographed by Raissa Simpson and actually got to watch her fly across the stage. OK, she was actually attached to cables, but there was still quite a bit of airborne action going on, and to be honest, it made me a little jealous.

Is the Bay Area's experimental beat scene finally coming together? After a few years of lagging behind the explosion of beat conductor talent in Los Angeles, and suffering a steady exodus of potential down south, the Bay Area's time for creating a forward leaning psychedelia — composed from the bass-infused backbone of instrumental hip-hop — might have arrived.Read more »

Long Meadow Ranch Winery does it all in Wine Country: grass-fed beef, heirloom fruits and vegetables, eggs from their chickens, lush olive oils, and, of course, wines. Seeking to grow everything used in their restaurant and winery, they continue to push boundaries, currently exploring a dairy and cheese-making.